The Sinai bus crash was a bus accident in the Sinai Peninsula in August 2006 which left twelve Israeli tourists dead. The tourists, most of them Israeli Arabs were riding a chartered bus that overturned and landed upside down between Nuweiba and Taba. The survivors claim the driver intentionally crashed the bus and the incident was a terrorist attack.[1]
The Egyptian driver was convicted of negligence by an Egyptian court and sentenced to one year in prison. The passengers criticized the Egyptian government for holding up Magen David Adom emergency services at the Taba Border Crossing. The delay in medical attention is blamed for at least one of the deaths. The Egyptian authorities are accused of deliberately handing down a lenient sentence and treating the victims' families in a deplorable way. The head of the local council of Kfar Manda, where three of the dead came from, said Egypt treated them badly because they were Israelis.
Based on evidence amassed since the crash, the survivors maintain that the attack was premeditated. They believe that the initial plan was to kill Jews, but that the terrorist cell decided not to abort the plan even when they discovered that the passengers were Arabs.
According to one of the survivors, a newlywed whose bride was killed in the crash, "The entire ride the driver was very nervous. The driver said to us: you got Jewish education, you are the trash of the Jews and that we are traitors. When we asked him to turn on the air conditioning, he refused, saying 'soon you will all be very cold'. After the bus overturned, he walked out, stepped into a car that was waiting for him, and disappeared."
The victims are submitting compensation claims to Israel’s Terror Victim Fund on the basis of these charges, but they say that for political convenience, the two governments classified the tragedy as an accident, a ruling they are disputing legally.[2]